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“Foundation Center 2020” is the 10-year strategic plan for the Foundation Center, launched in 2011. A continual work in progress, we invite your feedback to help shape, strengthen, and guide our progress in advancing knowledge about philanthropy.

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The new map of social change

With the movement of money, people, and ideas that globalization brings, our world is one of almost unlimited possibility. But it is also a world in which there is too much poverty, violence, and pollution and not enough justice, beauty, and opportunity.
Foundations, with their freedom to innovate, and nonprofits, with their unlimited reserves of hope and commitment, must strive to change that. They will do so in a world in which the very pace of change is accelerating and working in isolation will no longer get the job done.

Digital technology is the accelerator. It makes it possible to handle ever greater quantities of data from multiple sources and combine such information in limitless ways. Because data is beginning to be more widely available (and is more visible), today when people think about philanthropy, they think not just about grantmaking foundations—the Foundation Center’s traditional area of expertise—but individual giving, operating foundations, corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, mission-related investment, and other uses of private wealth for public good. Nonprofits, the largest users of Foundation Center services, still want to secure foundation grants, but increasingly they want to know about how to leverage resources from all these other sources as well.

There is also growing consciousness that philanthropy is not just an American invention, but a global industry. According to a study commissioned by the European Union, the assets of European foundations are greater than or equal to those of American foundations, as are their program expenditures. Brazil’s philanthropic institutions now spend in excess of two billion dollars per year. China’s foundations—nearly half of which are private—number in the thousands, and philanthropy in India, the rest of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa is on the rise.

Philanthropy is growing, becoming more diverse and more conscious of the limitations of its resources in relation to the scale of the problems it seeks to address. Increasingly, philanthropists see their work as being strategic catalysts for change. Tomorrow’s philanthropists will have to “cross boundaries” by learning more about what others are doing before committing their own resources, by collaborating more among themselves and with other sectors, by being more transparent in communicating their work and, at times, by reaching out to partners around the world. Similar challenges face nonprofits, which must find new ways to collaborate among themselves, with donors of all types and with social enterprises, and to combine the best of in-person with online networking.

A legacy of vision and innovation

The Foundation Center was created more than 50 years ago. It was the product of both crisis and extraordinary vision. The crisis came in the form of hearings held by the U.S. Congress to investigate allegations that foundations were supporting so-called “un-American” activities. The vision came from foundation leaders who realized that the relationship between government, the public, and foundations would always be a bit like a love affair—fueled mostly by great passion and mutual admiration, but punctuated by moments of jealousy and suspicion. Their insight was that absolute transparency would be the best way to make the relationship a long-term success.

The Foundation Center opened its doors in l956, with 7,000 paper documents about American foundations in file cabinets free for public inspection. In the sixties, the Foundation Center started an office in Washington, DC so staff could go to government offices to hand-copy information from the tax returns of U.S. foundations. In essence, the Center developed the market for grant giving and grant seeking by aggregating information that was buried in tax returns and largely inaccessible to nonprofit organizations. Today we take for granted that foundations make grants for specific subjects in specific geographic locations, often to serve specific populations, and that the grants can be made for varying types of support ranging from advocacy to technical assistance. This structure, developed by the Foundation Center, “shaped” the field by making it possible for nonprofits to systematically search for grants and for foundations to better track their work in terms of funding trends and periodic reports that served as a kind of census for philanthropy.

Information pulled from thousands of foundation tax returns found their way into the first edition of The Foundation Directory, a formidable print publication that launched many a nonprofit on the search for resources. Over time, print publications gave way to CD-ROMs and to online searchable databases, particularly the Foundation Directory Online, inaugurated in 1999. The Foundation Center launched its web site in l994 at a time when only three foundations had web sites of their own. And in 2008, the Center introduced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping of foundation grants and recipients.

A networked organization

The Foundation Center was also visionary in developing a networked structure before that notion was in vogue. Headquartered in New York, the Center opened its first field office in Washington, DC in l963, followed by similar offices in Cleveland, San Francisco, and Atlanta. In l959 the first “Cooperating Collection” opened in Chicago—a kind of affiliate providing free public access to Foundation Center databases, publications, and training materials. Today these funding information centers number more than 450 and are found across the United States and around the world in countries including Australia, Mexico, Brazil, China, Thailand, and Nigeria. Together our field offices and Cooperating Collections create a dense “high-touch” network of public access that complements the “high-tech” delivery of our online offerings.

Our Vision

A world enriched by the effective allocation of philanthropic resources, informed public discourse about philanthropy, and broad understanding of the contributions of nonprofit activity to increasing opportunity and transforming lives.

Our Mission

To strengthen the social sector by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the U.S. and around the world.

Our Beliefs

Philanthropy is an engine for positive social change worldwide.

Transparency and accountability are keys to earning the public trust.

Knowledge about philanthropy starts with accurate information.

Access to accurate information about philanthropy advances responsible and effective use of resources.

Grantmaker and nonprofit effectiveness is enhanced by shared information and understanding.

Our Practices

We deliver the highest quality of service to all those who use our resources.

We build partnerships that help us fulfill our mission.

We recognize diversity as an asset essential to accomplishing our mission.

We preserve our credibility by remaining independent and objective.

We build capacity, talent, and excellence within the social sector.

We embrace innovation and harness technology to maximize our effectiveness.

We make a significant portion of our resources available for free.

We exercise fiscal responsibility as a means of achieving our mission.

This strategic plan is based on a series of core assumptions about philanthropy and social change, each of which has implications for the Foundation Center.

Assumption

Implication for the Foundation Center (FC)

Organized philanthropy (foundations) will continue to grow in the U.S. in terms of assets and giving.

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Main FC databases covering foundations and their grants will need to expand significantly.

U.S. philanthropy will become an increasingly segmented industry with a relatively small (but growing) number of richly-endowed, well-staffed, and sophisticated foundations; a growing number with global ambitions; and a very large number of much smaller foundations, some with little or no staff at all, whose giving is primarily local.

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FC will need to develop a broader range of services to meet the needs of the full spectrum of foundations while giving nonprofits the knowledge they need to gain support from an ever-growing universe of foundations.

Outside the U.S., philanthropy will continue to grow at a rapid pace, particularly in those countries and regions taking on greater importance in the global economy.

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FC will need to build global alliances and partnerships with individual foundations and national and regional associations to gain access to greater quantities of data on the work of foundations around the world.

As philanthropy and the fortunes that fuel it grow, governments, the media, and online communities will demand to know more about philanthropy and philanthropists.

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FC will need to help foundations find the tools they need to meet the challenge of transparency in the digital age.

The tool kit of organized philanthropy will increasingly be a continuum ranging from grants at one end to market-rate, mission-related investments at the other, with a broader array of operating programs and direct charitable activities in between.

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FC will need to expand its data architecture and research efforts to cover as many of these forms of philanthropy as possible.

New forms of social investment will continue to evolve such that foundations will share the landscape with online giving/volunteering platforms, for-profit social enterprises, and new forms that we have yet to see.

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FC will need to collect and/or gain access to data on social investment beyond grants and grantmakers.

Organizations seeking funding will need to employ a wider variety of strategies including nonprofit restructuring and collaboration, multi-sector partnerships, social enterprise financing, and increased orientation towards bottom line results and “social impact."

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FC will need to expand its online data resources, research, and educational programs to connect those in the social sector to a wider array of resources.

Philanthropy will be increasingly data- and knowledge-driven as donors strive for more impact on a larger scale, and finding the right information quickly will be paramount.

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FC will need to expand its efforts to make sure its data is readily available, as current as possible, and seen and used by donors.

Working at scale will require collaboration with other foundations, government, the private sector, and nonprofits—often across the globe.

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FC will need to develop more and more platforms and tools that put a broad mix of information—including data on global philanthropy—at people’s fingertips, thereby lowering the transaction cost of collaboration.

Philanthropy and social investment will expand in such a way that no one organization can cover all its needs and possibilities.

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Through collaboration, acquisition, and “coopetition” the FC will meet the data and knowledge needs of the sector.

Radical changes in the information industry will continue to challenge business models and traditional roles of producers and consumers of information.

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FC will need to find the right balance between open and free data, including user-generated content, and that for which a fee can be charged.

Technology will make it possible to do things tomorrow with data, its delivery, and its visualization that we can’t begin to imagine today.

At the core of much of the Center’s work over the past 50 years lies an effort to build the capacity of the nation’s nonprofits to better navigate the funding environment. While our founding mission was to make information available to all, it quickly became
apparent that the greatest need came from staff of nonprofits looking for funding from foundations to assure the success of their organizations. By combining print and online resources with training and education, the Center has kept nonprofits up-to-date about the rapidly changing and ever more complicated process involved in accessing foundation resources.

Today we serve nonprofits through a network of 450 funding information centers across the globe, five full-service offices of the Center, a database with over 11,000 organizational subscribers, and one of the most popular information-based web sites in the sector, receiving 50,000 visits per day. In essence we provide a unique blend of broad physical presence with even broader virtual reach—a combination of high-tech and high-touch. In keeping with the changing landscape, our efforts will expand to more fully serve the broadening social sector—nonprofits, new forms of organizations, and individuals—that will find in the Center the “go-to” place for their information and training needs. They can walk into one of our physical locations, or find us through institution-wide access to the Foundation Directory Online (FDO) at a major university, or visit us virtually on the web. We expect to further solidify this unique position as we increase efficiency in the sector, lower the barriers of entry for new players, and level the playing field for all those who need our resources to succeed.

GOALS

Live and online exchanges about problem solving in the social sector

Expand GrantSpace, our web platform that helps grantseekers build community around the Foundation Center’s and their own content

The Foundation Center’s rich data on decades of foundation giving, philanthropy news, and foundation-funded research provides a wealth of information ripe for mining on virtually any cause in which a donor might be interested. Add to this core competencies in
data architecture, visualization, and web design, and the Foundation Center is uniquely positioned to build the kinds of knowledge tools that donors, foundations, regional associations of grantmakers, affinity groups, donor advisors, and others need to make giving more strategic, efficient, and effective. Our vision includes a one-stop shop for grantmakers that offers a suite of standard data tools, “how-to” resources, specialized databases, and issue-focused portals filled with research—in addition to custom knowledge tools built on demand. Together these will significantly reduce the barriers to information exchange that make effective collaboration among foundations so difficult, thereby unleashing its potential for greater impact.

GOALS

Data-driven decision making on how best to allocate donor resources

Offer versions of Philanthropy In/Sight and other mapping/visualization tools customized around issues/geography to tell donors who is funding what, where

With Philanthropy In/Sight, the Foundation Center has taken a giant step forward in building the platform for visualizing information about global philanthropy. In addition to information on nearly 94,000 U.S.-based grantmakers, this platform already includes foundations and grants in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and China. We have proven to ourselves and others that it is indeed possible to capture this data and display it in such a way that an interactive vision of philanthropy as a global movement begins to appear. We will now implement a strategy for doing this on a systematic basis through the work of data collection (directly and through partners), architecture (structuring it in a way that can be aggregated, compared, and researched), and access (maps, online tools, and other databases). Because of the differences in philanthropic cultures/practices around the globe, this will also entail building out the Foundation Center’s existing taxonomy, dealing with multiple languages and currencies, and with a host of other data and technology issues that will also improve the quality of our U.S. data. Moreover, the Foundation Center will need to ensure that it has a seat at the table in conversations with foreign aid donors, multilateral lenders, and government transparency advocates that are pushing to define future data standards with which, at a minimum, foundation data will need to be comparable. We know what this involves in terms of staff, IT capacity, web design, data visualization, and other resources to do it well, and feel strongly that the Foundation Center is the organization with the expertise, experience, and depth to take on a long-term challenge of this nature.

As private wealth for public good, philanthropy is intended to contribute positively to social welfare, solving society’s most pressing problems, and, in general, making the world a better place. Basic information about the field is essential so that the media, researchers, nonprofits, and foundations themselves have a solid understanding of the scale and potential of philanthropy. But the public cares most about the issues and causes that motivate them in their daily lives, and it is essential that they see philanthropy as relevant to their concerns. While writing on philanthropy frequently covers topics like donor intent, payout, or direct charitable expenditures, the news that attracts wide public attention is filled with reporting on immigration, climate change, unemployment, terrorism, or economic policy.

The Foundation Center has the data, research capacity, and communication resources to meet these broad-ranging information needs. Whether it is fulfilling our traditional role as the trusted resource for accurate information on philanthropy or telling the story of how foundations and nonprofits are responding to the latest crisis or disaster, going beyond the data and bringing knowledge to the fore is something we are well positioned to do.

GOALS

Facts, analysis, and opinion to inform public discourse

Web portals on philanthropy’s work on major issues facing society and the world

A rapid-fire “Philanthropy and . . .” series communicating how foundations are working on hot topics being discussed in the news today

Coming in the wake of congressional allegations about foundation activity at the height of McCarthyism, the Foundation Center was born out of a conviction that philanthropy would be best served by proving that it had nothing to hide. The Center’s original mission was to make the world of foundations more transparent. Today, as more and more people are accessing greater quantities of information online, pressure is growing on foundations to be more transparent about operations and how they fulfill their missions to serve the public good. The Center intends to play a leading role in galvanizing a transparency movement within philanthropy by demonstrating the many positive steps foundations are already taking in this regard and encouraging foundations to learn from their peers. This will increase public trust in foundations as greater numbers of foundations openly communicate information about their governance, procedures, programs, and impact to the public. At the same time, greater transparency will reduce duplication of effort in the field and facilitate greater collaboration among foundations.

GOALS

Knowledge and tools to help foundations be more transparent

Provide foundations with a rich array of examples showing what their peers are doing to meet the growing demand for online transparency

Design self-diagnostic tools for foundations to assess and improve their own transparency

Re-design and re-launch our service to design and host foundations’ web sites by focusing on start-up and smaller foundations and adding new features including mapping, databases, knowledge centers, Facebook pages, and more

Over the last few decades, the Foundation Center successfully made the transition from a print-based directory operation to a sophisticated online presence including industry-leading databases, web portals, GIS mapping, social media, and more. In a rapidly evolving digital environment, constant improvements will be required in order to ensure that the Foundation Center’s technology is up to the task of meeting our ambitious strategic goals. In order for our outward facing platforms, databases, and tools to best serve a demanding public, our internal information technology infrastructure will have to be the best it can be. This includes the technology backbone required to “open up” our information culture through incorporating growing volumes of user-generated content, as well as delivering our data and knowledge to the places people are accustomed to doing their work online and getting their information.

The Foundation Center of today is preparing for the knowledge-driven philanthropy of tomorrow, and in the world of today knowledge starts with data.

With huge volumes of historical data on U.S. philanthropy; growing data and relationships involving foundations around the world; rich content in terms of foundation and nonprofit research; a research institute of its own; increasing multimedia content; and significant mapping and data visualization capabilities, the Foundation Center is poised to help shape the field once again. We are committed to providing nonprofits, donors, advisors, social investors, and others with the kinds of data-driven tools, research, and analysis that will help them maximize the allocation of their resources—whether it be in their own community or around the world—on the issues they care about the most.

Shaping involves trying to see today what will drive the practice of philanthropy tomorrow, as new generations come into the field: not an easy task, but one for which the Foundation Center has considerable core capabilities in an era where data, information, and knowledge are at the forefront.